ABSTRACT
The success of the Indian information technology (IT) industry can partly be attributed to its ability to constantly adapt to the changing business environment. Change often involves an element of learning and the firm’s ability to integrate common and specialist knowledge into their production routines (Grant, 1996a, 1996b). Such changes often require organisations to explore new knowledge and exploit existing knowledge and resource bases (March, 1991). More recently, scholars have suggested that the ability of organisations to simultaneously explore and exploit new learning, or ambidexterity, is a key dynamic capability for ensuring sustained growth and performance (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2008; Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997). As evident in Chapters 1, 2 and 5, firms in the Indian IT industry undertook significant changes to their operations and business models for solving their clients’ business problems by developing sustainable value propositions. Such a view is common in research on business models, which suggests that successful firms create and realise value by offering solutions that fulfil a customer’s latent or expressed needs at effective prices (Zott, Amit and Massa., 2011; Johnson, Christensen and Kagermann, 2008). Reinventing business models requires attention to four key areas: customer value proposition, resource architecture, profit formula and underpinning processes (Johnson et al., 2008). Human resource (HR) and HR management (HRM) practices can and do support the management of change, developing new learning and knowledge resources and, through appropriate policy choices, firms can develop robust process management (Caldwell, 2001; Ulrich, 1997; Ulrich and Brockbank, 2005).
